1. Technical Field
Aspects of the present invention relate to a document feeding device for feeding a document from a document input tray to a document output tray via a scanning position of a document scanner.
2. Prior Art
In a document feeding device for feeding a document from a document input tray to a document output tray via a scanning position of a document scanner, the order of arrangement of documents ejected to (stacked on) the document output tray generally varies depending on whether the scanning mode of the document scanner is single-side scan (scanning one side of each document) or double-side scan (scanning both sides of each document by turning over each document with a turnover mechanism). Some of conventional document feeding devices are designed to eject the scanned documents to the document output tray after rearranging the order of the documents by carrying out idle feeding (turning over each document again with the turnover mechanism). However, the idle feeding results in an increase in the time necessary for ejecting each document (i.e. for completing the scanning of each document).
In order to avoid the problem, an automatic document feeding device disclosed in Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. HEI 11-314856 (FIG. 1), for example, is equipped with two separate document output trays (single-side document output tray, double-side document output tray). The automatic document feeding device ejects the scanned documents to the single-side document output tray in cases of single-side scan, while ejecting the scanned documents to the double-side document output tray in cases of double-side scan. Such an automatic document feeding device is capable of shortening the time necessary for completing the scanning of each document since the aforementioned idle feeding is unnecessary.